145
her romantic relationships. But in May
2018, she made an exception in the form
of a widely admired clapback after a fan
of Miller’s took to Twitter following the
rapper’s arrest for drunk driving, sug-
gesting that being spurned by Grande
was the cause. Her reply was swift and
lacerating: “shaming and blaming a
woman for a man’s inability to keep his
shit together is a very major problem.
let’s please stop doing that.”
“People don’t see any of the real stuff
that happens, so they are loud about
what they think happened,” she says
now. “They didn’t see the years of work
and fighting and trying, or the love and
exhaustion. That tweet came from a
place of complete defeat, and you have
no idea how many times I warned him
that that would happen and fought that
fight, for how many years of our friend-
ship, of our relationship. You have no
idea so you’re not allowed to pull that
card, because you don’t fucking know.
That’s where that came from.” Grande
spent years consumed by worry about
Miller. Friends with her during the
Dangerous Woman tour recall a wom-
an up at all hours, desperately tracking
his whereabouts to ensure he wasn’t on
a bender. “It’s pretty all-consuming,”
she says of her grief over Miller. “By
no means was what we had perfect, but,
like, fuck. He was the best person ever,
and he didn’t deserve the demons he
had. I was the glue for such a long time,
and I found myself becoming... less
and less sticky. The pieces just started
to float away.”
Grande has since backed off from
using social media to unload her feel-
ings, instead mainly posting benignly
glamorous images of ponytails and
photos of her dogs (she has seven, as
well as a miniature potbelly pig called
Piggy Smalls). This is an about-face
for a woman who has become actual
friends with her fans through Twitter,
who has been known to direct-mes-
sage them bars of music before she has
shared them with the folks at her label.
“Everyone thinks I’m crazy for doing
it, but I care about what they have to
say more than I care about what any-
one at my label has to say, no offense,”
she explains. “This is a me-and-them
thing. I’m not taking one of those
corny breaks from social media where
you’re like, ‘The internet hurts me, I’m
leaving, goodbye.’ But I’ve definitely es-
tablished a new boundary. I don’t want
to get myself into some shit.” Joan says
that she and her daughter have talked a
lot about the maintenance of bound-
aries lately. Ariana has always been an
empath. “She has a way of taking on
everyone’s pain,” Joan says. “She func-
tions really beautifully, but when she
has to laser herself to those heartbreak-
ing moments, I don’t think she can find
anything but tears. Sure, I worry about
her, but I always tell her, how you’re
feeling right now is perfect.”
One of the more puzzling chapters
of Grande’s public life was her short-
lived engagement to Davidson last year,
a kamikaze move made in the haze of
her breakup with Miller. Her friends
had convinced her to decamp to New
York, to escape L.A. and her patterns
there. “My friends were like, ‘Come!
We’re gonna have a fun summer.’ And
then I met Pete, and it was an amazing
distraction. It was frivolous and fun
and insane and highly unrealistic, and
I loved him, and I didn’t know him.
I’m like an infant when it comes to real
life and this old soul, been-around-the-
block-a-million-times artist. I still don’t
trust myself with the life stuff.”
Art is made richer through expe-
rience, of course, and Grande has
never made better art—or sold more
records—than when she decided to
make music out of the bitter history
of the last two years. But it’s nice to get
away from oneself now and then: She
is currently writing and producing the
soundtrack to the upcoming film re-
boot of Charlie’s Angels, will costar in
Ryan Murphy’s Netflix adaptation of
the Broadway musical The Prom—and
there’s a big acting job she’s hoping to
land, though she doesn’t want to jinx it.
“I have this idea of what I’d like to
be,” she says. “I can see this stronger,
amazing, fearless version of myself
that one day I hope to evolve into.
Sometimes I try to be that for my
fans before I actually am that myself.
I think I’ve been avoiding putting in
the work. You know how that gets:
You push your therapist away at some
point, but then you have to get back
to it.” She musters a laugh. “Do you
know a good therapist?” @RUN THE WORLD:
AMY SHERALD
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 112
“and see performers and performances
created by people who look like you.”Sherald was born and raised in
Columbus, Georgia, the third of four
children. Her father was a dentist, but
when Sherald was seven, he was diag-
nosed with Parkinson’s disease, which
ended his practice. “We were doing
well, and then we were not doing well,
because there was no money,” she says.
To make ends meet, her all-conquer-
ing mother, who had been a housewife,
became a bank manager, and Sherald
took over a lot of the housework and
looked after her younger brother, Mi-
chael. “Our house had woods behind
it, so we’d walk back there and explore
and set traps for raccoons and do crazy
stuff.” The family went to church every
Saturday, a strict fundamentalist sect
called the Worldwide Church of God,
which forbids celebrating Christmas,
Easter, or birthdays, and bans TV from
Friday night to Saturday night.
She was introduced to art through
the family’s encyclopedia, where she
would study reproduced paintings. At
school, she was the only black kid in her
class, and she stayed at her desk during
recess because she liked to draw in a
quiet room. She took private lessons
from her school art teacher straight
through to 12th grade. But when she
announced that she wanted to be an
artist, both her parents balked—they
wanted her to be a doctor. She became
a premed student at Clark Atlanta Uni-
versity, but at the start of her junior
year, she changed her major to fine art.
“I had to do it,” she says. “I came out
from under the thumb of my moth-
er, shaved my head, started dressing
grunge, got a labret” (a piercing below
the lower lip). She moved to Maryland
for her M.F.A., and spent a few months
after she graduated apprenticing in
Norway with Odd Nerdrum. And then,
instead of heading for New York, as
most M.F.A. grads do, she returned to
Baltimore, which would be her home
base, off and on, for the next 13 years.
Becoming an artist, for Sherald, was
a long battle against heavy odds—there
was her own health and her brother’s
death, and in 2005, her mother had
asked her to return to Georgia to help
care for her ailing aunts. That trip
turned into a four-year stay. When she
finally returned to Baltimore, she wait-
ressed five nights a week to pay for her
$300-a-month studio in a boarded-up
old car garage that had no air-condi-
tioning or CONTINUED ON PAGE 146